Mortality in Urban and Rural Areas with a High Proportion of Aboriginal Residents in Canada: Methods for Use with Administrative Data Lacking Explicit Aboriginal Identifiers.

Russell Wilkins, Statistics Canada
Philippe Finès, Statistics Canada
Sacha Senécal, Indian and Northern Affairs Canada
Eric Guimond, Indian and Northern Affairs Canada

Canada has a wealth of population-based administrative data on health, but with a dearth of information explicitly concerning race, ethnicity or SES. While area-based methods have been widely used with respect to neighborhood SES, such methods can also be used for routine surveillance of health data for areas with a relatively high proportion of aboriginal residents. Canadian postal codes are first converted to census dissemination area codes (US block groups), then health outcomes for dissemination areas with a high proportion of aboriginal residents are compared to otherwise similar dissemination areas with a low proportion of aboriginal residents. Because of its high concentration in isolated northern settlements, Canada's Inuit population is well identified using area-based methods. In rural and northern areas, First Nations communities are also fairly well-identified using such methods, but in urban areas they are much less highly concentrated, as are Métis people in both urban and rural areas.